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WordPress and Joomla. by Allen LaNear. What’s WordPress and Joomla?. WordPress and Joomla are two of the most popular open-source CMS’ around. They offer large and active developer communities and excellent documentation .
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WordPress and Joomla by Allen LaNear
What’s WordPress and Joomla? • WordPress and Joomla are two of the most popular open-source CMS’ around. • They offer large and active developer communities and excellent documentation. • WordPress is the first choice among the designer community mostly because of its well-designed back end and wide availability of excellent themes. • Joomla, meanwhile, suffers from Mambo’s legacy, which was notorious for low performance and semantically incorrect output. But since the release of version 1.5, Joomla has a completely rewritten core, with improved extensibility and better HTML output. • One difference between WordPress and Joomla is their theming model. A website developer migrating from Joomla to WordPress might feel that the latter requires too much theme coding, while a developer moving the other way might feel that Joomla is less flexible and customizable.
WordPress • WordPress’ theming model is based on a per-view structure. • This means that in each theme, you could have individual view files for the post list, the single post and the archive pages. • These files are independent of each other, allowing the developer to customize each view but requiring them to duplicate many parts of the code. • The only common parts in a theme are the header and footer, which can be coded directly in the individual view anyway. • The main drawback of this model is that different views will not always require a different presentation. To overcome this problem, a theme is organized in a hierarchical structure, in which more generic views are used as fallbacks for specific ones. The common fallback for a WordPress theme is the index.php file, which is actually the only required file in a theme.
Joomla • Joomla has a completely different theming approach. • Joomla’s templates are built on a common structure defined in an index.php file. • This file contains both static content and template tags, which serve as content place-holders and are replaced by HTML output during the page-rendering phase. • This structural backbone implies that each view in the CMS outputs not a complete page but just what’s needed to present content. • At first glance, a developer used to the theming model of WordPress might think that there’s no way to customize this content block. • In fact, Joomla relies on the MVC Architectural Pattern, meaning that data extraction and presentation are separated, the latter being rendered by the view part of the application.
Links and Sources • Links: Examples and help sites. • http://people.joomla.org/videos/video/380-Joomla+Example+Sites.html?groupid=567 • http://help.joomla.org/ • http://lonnroth.info/ • http://www.maverickwebcreations.com/ • Sources: • http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/03/joomla-and-wordpress-a-matter-of-mental-models/
What I would choose • I would choose WordPress mainly because it has a wide availability of cool themes. • It seems more organized and formal which I like. The End